Tag Archives: ted leo

Tuneage

REMINDER: Give ‘Til it Hurts So Good!

goodguys.jpgAs I alerted this readership last week, the WFMU Pledge Marathon is afoot. So pledge today!

Or pledge tonight, during The Best Show on WFMU. Ted Leo and Aimee Mann will be in studio, playing songs for pledges. Paul F. Tompkins and John Hodgman will be there to provide hilarity. And a pledge of $75 gets you a brand-new pledge-exclusive Scharpling & Wurster CD. Wow! A bargain at twice the price!

But not only that! That same $75 pledge earns you another pledge exclusive: an all-star tribute to the Paul & Linda McCartney album RAM, with songs covered by such esteemed artists as the two titans mentioned above, plus Death Cab for Cutie, Times New Viking, Portastatic, and many more.

What else do you get? Much much much much more! Actually, just a totebag, near as I can tell. But that can be much much much much more, depending on what you intend to use it for.

Actually, you get the satisfaction of knowing you helped one of the funniest radio programs of all time and one of the few radio stations in the NYC area worth listening to. So if you give no other monies to charity this year–and you know you won’t!–give to this!

Tuneage

The Ever-Increasing Inflation of the American College Diploma

Via a tweet from Ted Leo–who is a veritable fount of information–I found out that eight original members of Sha Na Na hold advanced degrees. Eight. Don’t believe me? Click here.

And in case you don’t know who Sha Na Na were, they were kinda like a greasy Polyphonic Spree, but they wore wifebeaters instead of choir robes and moussed their hair within an inch of its life and sang doo-wop. So I guess, not at all like the Polyphonic Spree except that both bands have five thousand members.

Regardless, would you want to go to a school that gave one of these guys a doctorate? (Bowser excepted, of course; I enjoy his essays in The Economist.)

The Funny, Tuneage

A Dumb Internet Meme I Can Get Behind

A recent tweet from Ted Leo alerted me to the latest intertube craze: making fake album covers. Apparently, it goes like this: you get an artist name from a random Wikipedia page, an album title from a random quotation, and a cover image from Flickr’s “explore last 7 days” page. It’s about as stupid and addictive as it sounds.

I gave it a shot and came up with two decent LPs. This one’s from my side project with PJ Harvey:

fakealbum2.jpgAnd this one’s from my industrial/goth group:

fakealbum3.jpg

Update: Ted just posted another example, far superior to mine. He’s just as good at making fake albums as he is making real ones.